Thursday, February 23, 2017

BREAKING Donald Trump Has Repealed Obamacare!

This is a very interesting take from political operative Dick Morris.

He reports that President Trump has ordered that the IRS not enforce the individual mandate and that Trump has changed the rules for health insurance coverage so that insurance companies can offer insurance plans that are much more flexible than what was the case under Obamacare.

In other words, a lot of the coercion of Obamacare has been eliminated by Trump already through the backdoor.



Congress can dillydally all it wants with "repeal and replace,' in fact, the more delay the better if Morris is correct in his analysis.

Here is how FiveThirtyEight reported the Trump executive order on Obamacare when Trump signed it on his first day in office:
As promised, on his first day in office, President Donald Trump took steps to undo the Affordable Care Act, former President Obama’s signature health care law. In one of his first executive orders, Trump pushed the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other federal agencies to begin weakening the law. The meaning of the executive order is both subtle and bold; on the one hand, it does very little because it doesn’t grant the administration any powers that it didn’t already have. On the other hand, it signals to the public that change is coming and lets employees at HHS know that they’d better be part of that change.

Section 2 of the order instructs the secretary of HHS to “exercise all authority and discretion available to them to waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay” parts of the law that would place a fiscal burden on states, individuals or health-care providers. Most of the provisions in the ACA can’t just be changed by HHS or the president; they require action from Congress or a lengthy period involving public comment. Which is why it’s reasonable to assume this line is targeted at the things HHS can change, like the individual mandate. The individual mandate, which requires most people to have health insurance or face a tax penalty, has always been the most contentious part of the law...

The Affordable Care Act also mandates that insurance plans cover a set of services without charging for them (beyond monthly insurance premiums), but it’s up to HHS to lay out the specifics. For example, that part of the ACA that requires contraceptives be provided to insured women free of co-pays or deductibles? That’s not written in the law; it was part of how the law was interpreted by the Obama administration...

There are other important signals in the short executive order. It says HHS should “encourage the development of a free and open market in interstate commerce” and “provide greater flexibility to States,” suggesting that Trump will push HHS to grant more flexibility to states in how they implement the law.

It was no secret before Trump signed the executive order that he wanted the Affordable Care Act repealed, and all of these changes were possible before it was signed. But now Trump has made his intentions clear, with one of his first acts as president: The Department of Health and Human Services, “to the maximum extent permitted by law,” should get to dismantling.
NOTE: With the massive subsidies still intact, I wouldn't call the healthcare problem "solved" the way Morris does but the non-enforcement of the individual mandate, and the allowance of health insurance companies to sell catastrophic insurance without absurd Obamacare coverage appendages, has for all practical purposes resulted in Trump stabbing Obamacare with a dagger to the heart.

-RW

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